ARE Islam and democracy compatible? Iran’s parliamentary election this Friday will not provide a definitive answer, but it may provide some hints. It turns, in any event, on the issue of how democratic an Islamist regime can be. Iranians can elect, in a tolerably fair way, the representatives they want; the question is how much authority and freedom their system then allows these representatives. Our conclusion, suggested in another article, is not much. President Muhammad Khatami has succeeded in making the theocratic state less restrictive. But a growing number of Iranians—the bold, the thoughtful, the young—want an administration and a judiciary that are free from clerical despotism. The turbaned are finding it ever harder to slap these hungry reformers down.

Outside Iran, political Islam has long since lost the cohesive, cataclysmic energy that the western world, perhaps wrongly, detected in the years after Iran’s 1979 revolution. It has not, however, lost its power to alarm. The concept of “Islamic terrorism” still chills people, in Moscow these days as well as in New York. Christians in Nigeria’s Muslim states quail at the introduction of the sharia (religious law). And most Arab countries are still so wary of political Islam that they refuse to allow it any political licence at all.

Secularists share a simple fear: they believe that once Islamist politicians have got themselves into a position of control, they will never let go. The Islamists themselves feed that fear when they preach of power coming from God, of religion and state being one, and the separation of the two a secular aberration. But, so far, Iran is the sole example of radical Islamists running anything like a democracy. With democratic reform strongly promoted in this election, and with Iran’s braver prelates now admitting publicly that political power, even if divine in origin, belongs to the people, it is much too soon to pronounce that the Iranian test case has proved democracy and political Islam to be incompatible.

Alas, the Islamic world is not burdened with examples of good government, let alone democracy. But religion is seldom the culprit: look, rather, for cruel autocrats, corrupt feudal systems, overbearing armies or any combination of the above. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, is now working its difficult way through a bad inheritance, but its new, democratically chosen president is an Islamist of welcome moderation and its Islamic tradition has long been tolerant. Pakistan, a state specifically designed for Muslims, is in a poor way, but not on account of its religion (see article). Turkey would shine more convincingly as a democracy if its army had not thrown out a government dominated by mild Islamists.

The scene darkens as one moves west, with the Arabs inhabiting the least democratic patch on God’s earth. Most Arab rulers, be they kings or presidents, take all the decisions that matter; their minions then carry them out. If they cannot claim a crown, they are re-elected through soft-flowing referendums. Arab ruling parties, with cash and patronage in their gift, can usually win without cheating, though to be safe they usually cheat too. Religion is largely irrelevant to this common misbehaviour.

Adherence to an austere, even cruel, form of Islamic law puts Saudi Arabia at the bottom of most tourists’ wish-lists. But it is its feudal ruling family, not Islamic precept, that bars even the pretence of democracy. Syria’s President Hafez Assad, having rid himself of the Islamist “threat” by murdering many thousands at Hama in 1982, rules as an undisputed despot who intends, in feudal fashion, to pass the job on to his son. Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, who let his Islamists live, but then had to fight the movement’s armed wing, now locks up civilian Islamists to prevent them from taking part in politics. Algeria’s army preceded Turkey’s in pushing Islamists out of power, but in a manner that led to a savage eight-year civil war in the 1990s.

There are exceptions, of course, when Islamism itself is a principal villain. In Sudan, an unrelenting Islamist government in a religiously divided country has exacerbated a painfully long civil war. And the Taliban has enforced a primitive form of Islam on Afghanistan that has had the Iranians, as well as everybody else, in shock. Making matters worse, both regimes have trained and been host to the bands of roving mercenaries who keep alive the fear of Islamic terrorism.

The West has paternity rights to these terrorists, claims Russia, which says—perhaps disingenuously—that it was Islamist allies of the Chechens who blew up blocks of flats in Moscow last year. But Russia is correct about the paternity. In the 1980s, America, with Pakistan, financed, trained and equipped some 50,000 volunteers, mainly Arab, to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. When the Afghan war was won, the volunteers dispersed, looking for ways to practise the only skill they knew. One of them, Osama bin Laden, turned against America during the war with Iraq. A rich and clever Saudi, Mr bin Laden at one time ran a lethal network. He has now, it seems, been contained, a liability to the Taliban regime that may well eventually hand him over in exchange for international respectability. But there are many other “Afghanis”, capable of individual acts of great evil.

The actions of a few zealots have helped to discolour understanding of political Islam. The importance of the movement, these days, is not what it can achieve in the political field, and even less what it can do with its bombs. It is rather its mole-like incursions into ordinary life. In many Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East, people are behaving, or finding themselves obliged to behave, in a stricter Islamic manner. Suddenly, there are more curbs on what they can read, or how they can entertain themselves. Women, not always unwillingly, are having to cover up.

The happy exception to this trend is Islamist Iran. Here, people are beginning to find that they can burst out of old restrictions, not enter into new ones. Political Islam still provides dangers, but it also provides reasons for hope.

Under President Muhammad Khatami, Iran has become a more humane country. It has yet to become a more democratic one

ELECTIONS in the Middle East, Israel’s apart, rarely merit a first, let alone a second, glance. Yet the result of Iran’s parliamentary ballot, held on February 18th, is keenly awaited. The way the vote goes could be crucial to Iran’s fledgling struggle to harmonise democracy and Islamism. And since Iran is the only country to contemplate combining a strict Islamist regime with democratic practices, the election may provide a clue as to how compatible the two can be.

The Islamic republic holds reasonably decent elections, proving at least that a theocratic state and a free popular vote can go together. But this does not mean that the state itself is run along democratic lines. Even Iran’s elections have their quirks: in the weeks before the present one, several hundred candidates, predominantly from the reformist camps, were disqualified by the six clerics and six jurists on the Council of Guardians (a body that was originally formed to supervise elections but now screens the candidates too). However, despite all that, Iran’s electoral system shines in comparison with the shabby parody of democratic practice that most Arab regimes inflict on their voters.

Few people took note of Iran’s post-revolutionary elections until 1997, when the presidential ballot gave an unanticipated landslide victory to Muhammad Khatami. An unexceptional conservative candidate had been expected to drift home, but Iranians—particularly the young and frustrated—decided otherwise. They voted for Mr Khatami, and the hopes he had awakened of political and social change. Now, three years on, the issue is no longer whether or not there should be reform at all, but how deep-cutting and far-ranging that reform should be.

Iran is a much more open place to live in than it was when Mr Khatami took office. There have, as yet, been no vast changes of policy, but, under the benign influence of the president and his men, many of the petty rules and regulations that made things so drab for ordinary families have been forgotten about or, at least, are not so severely enforced. It is easier, for instance, for a boy and girl to go out together, for a family to own a satellite dish (though these are still officially banned), or for anyone to read a lively, dissenting newspaper.

Liberalisation proceeds by jumps and starts, and could yet go into reverse: no changes are official. The conservatives fight their rearguard battle through the courts and the mosques, clapping journalists, editors and protesting students into jail. People are unjustly prosecuted, punished for spurious crimes; the “special” or “revolutionary” courts come up with inexplicable judgments. A group of Iranian Jews was arrested, accused of breaking Iranian law by communicating with Israeli friends or relatives, and threatened with the death penalty. Rogue operatives inside the security services have, at times, decided it was simpler just to assassinate liberals they did not like.

But the regime quite often tries to backtrack from its more heinous mistakes, punishing the over-zealous, letting people quietly out of prison or reducing their sentences when it thinks enough time has gone by to save face. As one radical paper is closed, another springs up in its place. And the last editor to be imprisoned used his trial as a magnificent platform to trounce his accusers, calling for changes that would, in effect, shift power from the unelected and unaccountable to the elected and accountable.

The goal, say Iran’s more dedicated reformers, has now moved beyond easing rules and regulations—desirable though that still is—towards institutional change. The reformers want to reinterpret and democratise Iran’s Islamic constitution, which they claim hard-core conservatives have distorted; they want a unified and independent judicial system, and they are working towards the separation of powers. But here they have run into an almost unbudgeable barrage of opposition, from centrists and “moderates” in their own reform camp as well as from conservatives.

Until now, altering the core of the Islamic system has been more or less unthinkable. Intellectuals who suggested it were accused of wanting to dismantle the sacred legacy of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. But, even here, things are now a little less hard and fast. If committed reformers turn out to have done well in Friday’s election—which at this point is very far from certain—the unthinkable will start to be thought about, may also be talked about, and, just possibly, may be gingerly acted upon. This is what makes the present election so significant.

The basis of Iran’s theocratic system is velayat-e faqih, or the rule of the religious jurist. This Shia Muslim concept, refined by Ayatollah Khomeini some years before the revolution, gives one man—Khomeini himself, of course, in his lifetime—absolute authority over all vital matters of state. As supreme leader, he is head of the army, the security services and the judiciary; he has the final say on both internal and international affairs. No important decisions can be taken without his consent. In holding such power, he is not unlike the Arab world’s “elected” presidents in, say, Egypt or Syria, or its less-than-constitutional monarchs. But Iran’s potentate is selected by a body of senior clerics, known as the Assembly of Experts, and it is his duty to ensure that all political action is the execution of God’s will.

Nobody questioned this state of affairs so long as Khomeini was alive. The imam, as he is universally known in Iran, died in 1989, revered to the end and beyond it. His successor, Ali Khamenei, was voted unanimously into the job by the clerics in the Assembly of Experts, but only after considerable difficulty. Ayatollah Khamenei is a much lesser man than his predecessor, lacking his authority, scholarship and esteem.

This is not to say he was a bad choice. He has not abused his position. And he is not an extremist: although staunch conservatives have tried to claim him as one of their own, and have sometimes succeeded, he seems to be basically a man of the centre-right. Importantly, he has a close working relationship with Mr Khatami. The directly elected president, whose powers are so inferior to those of the indirectly chosen supreme leader, has never once hinted that he is uncomfortable with his boss’s supervision.

Mr Khatami stands for democratic accountability and for the rule of law in a civil society. He wants to make Iran a more open, humane and just place, with better relations with the outside world, including the United States. But he is cautious, carrying out his reforms with a certain stealth, determined not to upset the apple-cart by going too far or asking for too much. He certainly does not question, at least out loud, the basic structure of the Islamic republic or its hierarchy. In a sense, he is both president and opposition leader.

This straddling of functions could, before long, become untenable. More impetuous Iranians are beginning to question, and balk at, the undemocratic set-up. An early sign of this impatience came during last July’s student demonstrations in Tehran. The protests, to start with, were of the licensed kind: the students were angry at the closure of a radical, free-speaking newspaper, and even angrier at the murderous invasion by right-wing thugs of one of their hostels.

But as the protest gathered steam, a few of the demonstrators crossed a crucial line. They went from voicing permitted grievances to those that are absolutely unpermitted: they dared, however indirectly, to question the velayat-e faqih, the mainstay of the Islamic system itself. Although these protesters declared themselves loyal supporters of the president’s reform programme, they were swiftly disowned, prudently but not honourably, by Mr Khatami.

Later, the ringleaders were harshly punished by the courts: several received heavy prison sentences and four were sentenced to death, though they have not, so far as is known, been executed. One of the nastiest aspects of Iran’s judicial system is its murkiness, and the frequent difficulty of obtaining reliable information.

The first public, unambiguous attack on Iran’s Islamic underpinning came last November when Abdollah Nouri, the publisher of a free-speaking newspaper, was tried by a clerical court on a long list of charges that ranged from insulting Khomeini to advocating normal relations with the United States. Unwisely, the court agreed to his demand that his six-day trial should be held in public. For Mr Nouri is a true heavyweight of the revolution, a mullah who was once Khomeini’s man in the radical Revolutionary Guard.

Like others in the reformist camp, his views have matured and changed over the past 20 years. Now judged to be too moderate, he lost his long-time job as interior minister, but was nonetheless thought to be in line to be speaker of parliament (Iran’s third-most-important post, after the supreme leader and the president) after the election. He is popular, coming top of the list in Tehran in the recent municipal elections.

He seized his chance. Speaking to the country as well as to his accusers, he rejected the idea that anybody should have a monopoly on religious interpretation, arguing that pluralism was acceptable under the Islamic system, and defending the right of dissident groups and theologians to present their views. He challenged the principle that the supreme leader was above the law. Political power, he argued, though divine in origin, should be exercised on behalf of the people by their elected representatives.

It was all too much—and anyhow the conservatives were determined to get Mr Nouri out of the way before the parliamentary elections. Found guilty of undermining the foundations of Islam, he was packed off to prison for five years. But his supporters published the transcript of the trial, calling it “Hemlock for a Reformist” (thus making the obvious comparison with Socrates, who was forced to poison himself with hemlock after speaking out at his trial in ancient Athens). The book became an immediate bestseller.

The next voice to challenge the system was even more venerable, and authoritative, than Mr Nouri’s. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a learned and independent-minded cleric, was once Khomeini’s anointed successor as supreme leader. Falling into disgrace in the late 1980s for being too independent (he spoke out against what he believed to be violations of Islamic justice, including mass executions), he now lives under house arrest in Qom, Iran’s most holy city, an important but largely soundless presence. Last month he decided to break his silence, giving a long written interview to a British newspaper, the Guardian.

Mr Montazeri did not pull his punches. “Islam”, he said, “is for the separation of powers and does not recognise the concentration of power in the hand of a fallible human being.” The supreme leader should be accountable, subject to the law and open to public criticism. He should be directly elected instead of being chosen by a body of his colleagues. Above all, his powers should be confined to matters that come within his own area of religious expertise, and not extended to other matters of state, such as foreign affairs and economic issues. As things stand, he complained, Iran’s president has heavy responsibilities but almost no executive power. The ayatollah could hardly have been more direct, or more challenging. Iranian papers that carried extracts from the interview found themselves banned.

Iran can become a much nicer country just by carrying on down the road that it has already embarked upon, albeit with many stops and starts. It can implement the harsher side of Islamic justice less fervently, relax its more repressive or tiresome rules, be fairer to women (who already do better than in some Arab countries), allow free expression and association. But it will not become a more democratic country until it accepts that clerical rule, the concept of velayat-e faqih, is not untouchable.

Conservatives quail from laying a finger on the sacred concept. Any tinkering, they believe, would be dangerous. Even if the approach were minimal, the momentum could, in the end, lead in some way to the distruction of Khomeini’s Islamic vision, the theocratic state. Some see Mr Khatami as an Iranian version of the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev, a reformist whose efforts led inexorably to the total collapse of a system.

Are they right? In one respect, at least. It is hard to see fundamental change to the theocratic state coming about in any way save through incremental reforms, a gradual corroding of the system. Any sudden or violent change seems remote. The regime’s most active enemy, the Mujahiddin e-Khalq, can bring out huge crowds-in-exile or even, as it did this month, explode mortars outside the palace of the supreme leader in Tehran, but there is little hard evidence to support its boast of widespread support throughout Iran. Its political programme is attractive enough. But the fact that its armed forces have, for lack of an alternative, been obliged to make their base inside Iran’s old foe, Iraq, tells heavily against it.

Iran’s army, by tradition, stays out of politics. The Revolutionary Guards, who are called out from time to time to quell “riots”, cracked that tradition this week when, against their own government’s policy, they issued a statement saying that Ayatollah Khomeini’s 11-year-old fatwa sentencing a British writer, Salman Rushdie, to death was as valid as ever. But the army stays quiet. In the past century, Iran has experienced only two military coups: the one that established Shah Reza Pahlavi in power in the 1920s, and the one when his son, Shah Muhammad Reza, joined the CIA to confront the threat of “communism” posed by Muhammad Mossadegh in the 1950s. Notably, the army did not intervene when the Islamic revolution overthrew the monarchical regime in 1979.

But the slow corrosion of Iran’s Islamic framework is not out of the question. Iran, although an Islamic state, imbued with religion and religious symbolism, is an increasingly anti-clerical country. In a sense, Iran resembles some Roman Catholic countries where religion is taken for granted, without public display, and with ambiguous feelings towards the clergy. Iranians tend to mock their mullahs, making mild little jokes about them; they certainly want them out of their bedrooms. In particular, they distrust their political clergy. The term “political cleric” was derogatory until Khomeini refurbished it with his own example of a political leader who was also a senior theologian. The first parliament after the revolution was dominated by mullahs. But clerical numbers in parliament have been decreasing ever since.

Although President Khatami, his predecessor Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Ali Akbar Nateq-Noori, the current speaker, all wear the long robes and turbans of clerics, all the political factions have found it expedient in this election to cut down yet again on the number of mullahs on their lists of parliamentary candidates. The reformists go further, sometimes not mentioning Islam at all in their speeches. At a reformist rally this week, in a Tehran student stadium, one of the speakers, in a standard Iranian way, chanted “Islam and freedom”. The students echoed him with a shout of “freedom” but were notably silent about Islam.

Distrust of political clergy does not add up to the desire to do away with the theocratic state; after all, in most democracies, sensible people distrust their politicians. And even if it did, it is not a choice that Iranians are going to be given in the foreseeable future. Where they do have a choice is in voting for people who are prepared to try to reform and modify the Islamic system, including, at least if some have their way, its most sacred mainstay, the authority of the supreme leader.

Khomeini, the last supremo, did not bother himself with day-to-day decisions, issuing orders and judgments from on high, many of which were ambiguous and quite a few contradictory. He left most of the decision-making to Mr Rafsanjani, who for nine successive terms was parliamentary speaker. Pragmatic Mr Rafsanjani, a compromiser par excellence, interpreted the ambiguities as he saw fit, being hardline or (relatively) moderate as he believed the particular circumstances demanded.

After two terms as president and a short stint on the fringes, Mr Rafsanjani is now once more standing for parliament. With Mr Nouri shut up in prison and Mr Nateq-Noori retiring, he has a good chance of becoming, yet again, parliament’s speaker. This was why committed reformists tried particularly hard, during the election campaign, to do Mr Rafsanjani down. If he is again to be in charge of parliament, the reformists fear, the prospect is yet more compromise.

The reformists hope to repeat Mr Khatami’s triumph of 1997, winning so conclusively that they can frustrate Mr Rafsanjani’s claim to the speakership.They dread a continuation of the push-me-pull-you tactics that keep the country shuffling forward, but do not allow it to progress far in the pursuit of a more humane, let alone a more democratic, regime. They also argue that if Iran continues to rock jerkily between reform and regression, there will almost certainly be repetitions of last summer’s student riots—and the regime’s brutal response.

They have a point. At pre-election rallies this week, students have been saying that this election is Mr Khatami’s last chance. If a reformist parliament is voted in, they will expect him to introduce fundamental change. If not, they will take matters into their own hands. The young and impatient are growing increasingly intolerant not only of clerical rule, but of clerical prudence too.

LINKS

Search the presidential archives and read selections from Muhammad Khatami’s speeches on the official website of Iran’s President. Iran’s Institute for Political and International Studies was founded by the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to encourage discussion within Iran about international issues. The Iranian constitution can be read here. The University of Texas’s Middle East Network Information Center has compiled a list of web information about Iran. Click here for the Economist Intelligence Unit’s view of the forthcoming election in Iran.

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LINKS

The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy is a non-profit think-tank based in Washington, DC, which is studying the Islamic tradition and democratic political thought. The Center publishes an online newsletter, Muslim Democrat, which can be downloaded in PDF format. The Islamic Foundation, based in London, has published an essay on the political framework of Islam.

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